


aiteall

by all_these_ghosts



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M, On the Run
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-16
Updated: 2018-01-16
Packaged: 2019-03-05 19:49:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,061
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13395015
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/all_these_ghosts/pseuds/all_these_ghosts
Summary: This is not the worst storm they’ve faced.





	aiteall

**Author's Note:**

> just putting some stuff up from tumblr, so if you follow me there you've seen this already! a few little edits.
> 
> GRMA for reading ;)

_good weather between showers; a break in the rain_

* * *

Off the coast in the off-season, peace.

“It floods a few times each winter,” the woman had warned Scully, pressing the keys into her hand. “Doesn’t cause too many problems so long as someone’s here to keep an eye on the place.”

Scully’s credentials for house-sitting are limited to having lived in a house, but the woman doesn’t seem to mind. “Not too many folks willing to spend the winter out here,” she’d remarked. “Lucky I found you two.”

The house overlooks the water. It’s quiet. Every few days she drives back over the bridge to buy groceries, Ambien, condoms. During the day they sit in the same room, mostly unspeaking. Scully watches the sea out the window and thinks about what the tide will carry in. At night they huddle together in the full-size bed upstairs. He whispers to her and she barely hears, but she knows all his secrets already.

The peace they’ve reached is hard-earned and she will not squander it. They’ve spent too long watching each other across some impossible distance; she needs this closeness now.

Every day for a week it storms. Thunder rolls in off the water; rain splashes against the windows. “It feels like we’re in a submarine,” Mulder says, staring out into the gale. When the power goes out they light candles in the main room. They fall asleep there, on a pile of blankets on the floor, some time before the last one burns out. In the middle of the night she wakes up and new candles are lit. Mulder sits at the desk in the corner, his pen scratching furiously across the paper.

Mulder is writing a book: so he tells her. While she spends her days and nights puttering around the house, or out walking along the perpetually wet sand, he writes and writes and writes. She doesn’t ask to read it. She’s not sure she wants to. Is he up like this every night?

When she wakes up again in the morning she thinks she might have dreamed it, but Mulder touches her with ink-smudged fingers, and anyway when was the last time she had a dream where no one died?

The power doesn’t come back. They carry wood in from the shed and light a fire for warmth. Once the phone rings and Scully picks up, but the connection is bad and she can’t make out who’s calling. She tells herself: _No one knows we’re here. No one will find us._

On the seventh night the hand-crank radio warns them of a stronger storm, incoming, high winds and lightning. They close all the shutters and wait together in the darkness. They haven’t seen the sun in what feels like half a lifetime. How much of her life she’s spent in the shadows.

While the rain continues unabated Mulder writes. His pen makes shadows across his face, the candlelight flickering around the edges, and she watches for a while. When the storm settles right over their house, shaking it down to the foundation, she leaves him and goes upstairs. Into the bedroom, out onto the balcony. _Widow’s walk_ , her memory corrects. Her hands gripping the railing, she stares into the squall.

The rain lashes against her face. In an instant she’s soaked. Cold to the bone, but she’s been that way for months now.

She thinks of her father commanding his ship, facing down the ocean swells, the tropical storms. He would’ve steered his boat straight into a hurricane if that’s what he were told to do. They'd had that in common, at least.

A voice yells her name. It’s Mulder, standing below her in the yard, his clothes already drenched. “Up here,” she calls down, and he shades his eyes against the wind and rain. Moments later he’s upstairs on the walk with her. The wind catches the door and it slams behind him.

“Come inside,” he says, and the command in his voice makes her shiver. _No_ , she thinks. _Not from you_.

Down the island a paddle boat is moored to the end of a short pier. The owners must have forgotten to bring it in. In the wind it beats itself ceaselessly against the dock. If she were a more whimsical woman, she’d swear she could hear it splinter.

“Women would stand out here, waiting for their husbands,” she says. She’s not raising her voice on purpose, not doing anything to compensate for the roar of the wind, the battering ram of the rain against the wood. Still, he hears her.

“I know.” His voice, too, sounds softer than it should. She can hear him, so he must be yelling. “I grew up on an island.”

She ignores him. “Sometimes they didn’t come back.” Her own mother, waiting for Ahab. Keeping watch in her own way, quiet. Maggie never complained, never longed for some other kind of life, for a man who stayed. A man who wanted her more than the mission.

Her father’s heart beating faster as he called out commands. All of those lives in his hands. His heart, beating.

Sometimes they don’t come back.

Mulder comes up next to her, blinking the rain from his eyes. He sets his hands on the railing, his left hand just brushing her right. He says, “I came back.”

 _Did you_ , she thinks.

He says, throatily: “I’m here.”

In the rain the ink runs off his hands, black smudges on the white paint. Lightning strikes a tree down the strand and for a moment the entire sky lights up, electric. This is not the worst storm they’ve faced.

She takes his hand and brings him inside, the ink seeping into her skin, too.

By the morning the rain has stopped. She wakes up wrapped in a blanket with no clothes on, her hair still damp. Mulder is next to her, fast asleep. The sun is back, however reluctant. It paints his shadow long and dark on the weathered floor.

Silently she pads down the stairs. She flips the switch on the coffee maker and it doesn’t respond: still no power. On the counter Mulder’s notebook lays open, an uncapped ballpoint pen lying perpendicular to the lines on the page.

She turns the pages back to the beginning, leaving her damp fingerprints on the corners. She starts to read.


End file.
